Cantor Fitzgerald Remembers 658 Employees Lost on 9/11
Left 33%
Center 0%
Right 67%
1 left · 0 center · 2 right
What happened
On September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of New York's World Trade Center below Cantor Fitzgerald's headquarters on floors 101 through 105, killing 658 of the bond-brokerage firm's 960 New York employees as well as 50 contractors and visitors; 61 people also died at competitor Euro Brokers in the South Tower. Then-CEO Howard Lutnick was not in the office because he was dropping his son Kyle off for the first day of kindergarten; his brother Gary Lutnick and close colleague Doug Gardner were among those killed. After the firm resumed electronic trading within days, Lutnick pledged 25 percent of profits for five years and 10 years of health coverage to victims' families — assistance later totaling about $180 million — and launched the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund. For the 25th anniversary in 2026, the fund published "The Families: 9/11 Anthology of Love, Loss, and Lessons of Resilience," edited by Edith Lutnick and Caroline Aiken Koster; Howard Lutnick, who left the firm in 2025 to become U.S. commerce secretary, issued memorial statements, his son Brandon Lutnick, now chairman, posted a public remembrance, and Cantor continued its annual Charity Day and a standing job offer for children of employees who died.
Sourcing check · Fully on the record · 3 articles
2 of 2 articles cite a named source for the story. It was on the record from the first report.
What these terms mean and how they're counted
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- How it developed
- When the first report landed and whether it named anyone; when the first named source and the first document appeared. Here: First report Sep 11, 14:37 UTC by New York Post, naming its source.
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This is about who is cited, not whether the story is true. Each source below says what it names. How we count
Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage never states how much money reached the families of Cantor's dead. Right-leaning coverage does: the New York Post reports the commitment totaled $180 million. Business Insider describes the profits pledge as fulfilled and stops there, so a reader cannot judge its scale at all.
Left-leaning coverage opens inside a family anthology assembled for the anniversary and stays with those voices for the length of the essay. Right-leaning coverage leads with the school run that kept Howard Lutnick out of the tower, then stays with his son and brother, and never names that book.
How did the families of the lost employees respond when Howard Lutnick left the firm for the Commerce Department?
Bottom line
The anniversary coverage that names The Families never names the $180 million; the coverage that names the $180 million never names the book.
The receipts — 6 facts one side's coverage lacks
- Cantor's aid to families of employees killed on 9/11 totaled $180 million
- The Relief Fund published The Families, a 9/11 anthology of family, survivor, and witness writings
- Hundreds of children of employees killed on 9/11 have since worked at Cantor under a standing hiring offer
- The firm pledged 10 years of health coverage to families of employees killed on 9/11
- Howard Lutnick left Cantor in 2025 to become U.S. commerce secretary and his son Brandon became chairman
- The Relief Fund later gave direct financial aid after Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Maria
The Left View
Business Insider published an essay by Caroline Aiken Koster, a Cantor senior attorney and Relief Fund general counsel who joined in 2002, adapted from the anniversary anthology she co-edited. Koster frames the 25 years as a "mosaic" of family voices — "e pluribus unum — out of many, one" — arguing the book gives families "a voice when so many have moved on" and functions as "a manual of surviving grief and building resilience." She recounts rebuilding work, annual memorials, Charity Day, and Relief Fund aid after Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Maria, and describes herself as "a unique witness — both insider and outsider" who lost a friend, Arlene Fried, not family. Her closing lesson, drawn from a mid-American state clerk who expedited corporate filings and asked that families be told "all of America is with them," is that "we are all connected" and "the common ground beneath us is wider than the issues that divide us," ending with the plea to "Rise. Always love. And remember."
The Right View
The New York Post and One America News Network center the Lutnick family's losses and the firm's subsequent pledges, quoting Brandon Lutnick that he does not remember the attacks themselves but remembers "everything that came after," including "names in our house before I knew whose they were." Coverage stresses that outsiders expected collapse while Cantor was "losing $1 million a day," and presents the profit-sharing, health coverage, and standing employment offer — with "hundreds" of victims' children later working at the firm — as "not a strategy" but "our promise." Brandon Lutnick warns that forgetting means losing "what that day taught us" and that "we cannot let that revisionism turn the people killed that day into a partisan dispute": "They were not symbols. They were not policy arguments. They were people." OAN highlights Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's tributes to his brother Gary, "killed at the young age of 36 for being an American and going to work that morning in the greatest country in the world," and to Doug Gardner, and notes Lutnick joined Vice President JD Vance and former presidents at the Ground Zero memorial where World Trade Center victims' names were read.
Our Take (balanced)
The left-leaning account's strongest argument is that the anniversary's lasting meaning is a chorus of family voices and ordinary nationwide kindness that argues for connection over fracture, supported by the anthology's mosaic conceit and Koster's story of a distant clerk who made exceptions and asked that colleagues and families be told America was praying for them. The right-leaning account's strongest argument is that memory must remain attached to identifiable people and to a measurable promise kept — the roughly $180 million in family aid and jobs for descendants — rather than dissolve into political use, supported by Brandon Lutnick's warning against "revisionism" and Howard Lutnick's personal eulogies of his brother and best friend. The central unresolved tension is whether this commemoration is mainly a call to stand on "common ground" wider than "the issues that divide us," or a warning that the dead were Americans who must not be recast as "symbols" or "policy arguments," a contrast sharpened by Howard Lutnick's current role in the Trump administration.
3 sources
- 'Were you there that day?' Inside Cantor Fitzgerald's 25-year odyssey of loss and resilience after 9/11
- Cantor heir recalls family’s 9/11 losses — and the kindergarten dropoff that spared Howard Lutnick
- Secy. of Commerce Lutnick honors Cantor Fitzgerald employees killed on 9/11, including his brother
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